EP35C-DS3R - SDD OCZ Vertex2 initial boot issue

[a5falt]

Hi there,

I've installed a new OCZ Vertex2 64GB SDD disk in my system, but there is an issue with the "cold start".
When I turn on my PC it does see the SSD on the 3rd port of the Intel controller, but it does NOT list it in the drives configuration in the bottom screen (CTRL-i) as a disk. And at this point booting from this disk fails.
But if I reboot (warm) it does show up as an additional (NON-RAID) disk and I can start XP without a problem. It runs fine within XP, it's just the booting from the disk that is bugging me.
I have 2 additonal disk in a RAID pair (port 0 and 4) and they are fine. Then there's an extra disk on port 3 but this is not a member disk, and there's an extra disk on port 6 ( port 1 of the Gigabyte controller).

BIOS ver. F2. (the newer ones did not control the CPU fan properly)

Any help would be appreciated.
Regards,
Ronald.

[Dark Mantis]

Hi Ronald and welcome to the Gigabyte Forum.

Two things spring to mind, the first is that have you got the latest firmware on your OCZ SSD as I know there have been issues woith these drives and Gigabyte boards.

Secondly is what mode are you trying to run it in. If it is AHCI that could be your problem as not all boards support it. In which case you would have to run in IDE mode. This is not much of a downside at all really as the speed difference is fairly negligable and unless you must have the hot swap capabilities you are not missing out on much.

[a5falt]

Hi Dark Mantis,

I'm running the latest firmware on the SSD V1.23 as I updated it before taking it "into production". 

I do not use AHCI mode at the time (on any controller) on this rig. I disabled it a long time ago to overcome some issue with new Samsung drives.

I've read some post about running on a beta BIOS on another borad with these SSD's?

Regards,
Ronald.

[Dark Mantis]

It might be worth having a look on TweakTown Forum as they usually have a better range of BIOSes than us.

http://forums.tweaktown.com/gigabyte/28441-gigabyte-latest-bios.html

[Lsdmeasap]

You could try setting a 3-5 second hard drive delay and see if that helps, generally though SSD should not need this so it sounds like maybe your SSD is partially faulty or something.

It could be the board though, I'd try the delay for sure and see if it helps.   Also be sure you are using the latest BIOS for the board, if you flash please use Qflash - DO NOT USE @BIOS 

[a5falt]

the board is running the latest (F4) BIOS but still it won't cold boot from the SSD.

I've read it could have something to do with the ROM versiuon of the Intel ICH9R, mine is currently

• RAID Option ROM Version: 7.5.0.1017
  Driver Version: 8.9.0.1023
  RAID Plug-In Version: 8.9.0.1023

and it looks like I need 8.5 or upwards. there are people building a new BIOS with the newer ROM but I can only find it for Asus boards.
Any info on how to get a newer Intel ROM on this Gigabyte board? 

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